>> Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience

	Interview with Michael Gazzaniga, Dartmouth College From Studying The Mind, VHS © 2003, W. W. Norton

What are the origins of cognitive neuroscience?

One of the reasons I hang around really smart people is that you benefit from their wisdom. And so in the late seventies and early eighties I had the privilege to hang around George Miller when he was at Rockefeller University and I was at Cornell. And we would meet frequently for a libation at the end of the day and talk, and out of those conversations came the idea of cognitive neuroscience.

At the time cognitive science was a rich field, but while researchers had all kinds of ideas about how information was represented in a cognitive system, they didn’t really try to tie it to physical structure—to the brain. And neuroscience was pretty flat footed on theory. Its focus was that neurons projected to a particular place, and that masses of them here were connected over there, but it wasn’t rich on models of cognition or perception as instantiated in the brain. So these things had to come together in some way. And so we cooked up this notion of a field called cognitive neuroscience. This was probably a matter of just precipitating what was in the air, but the idea took off.

The field started with patient studies and patient lesions—that sort of work—but shortly thereafter, in about 1983 or 84, we had the beginnings of brain imaging. At that time discovery of the event related potential also led to brain mapping in cognitive studies. Later, in the late eighties and early nineties PET and magnetic resonance imaging took off, and as a result the field has sky rocketed. The fundamental goal, though, remains the same–to try to understand what the brain is for. And this is an important question. The brain is a decision-making device. So what goes into the decisions that are made during low level perceptual tasks and high level cognitive tasks? What neuronal mechanisms are involved? What processes and laws and algorithms govern these processes? These are the big questions for cognitive neuroscience. And we’re not there by a long shot, but we're nibbling at the edges of these kinds of questions. My guess is that complex modeling of neuronal processes—both in the large network sense and at the micro level sense—is going to be the force driving cognitive neuroscience and our understanding how the brain does its major chore, which is making decisions.